To honor the legacy of murdered journalist and OPC member Kim Wall, her family and friends have established the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, administered and supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation. The fund will provide a young woman reporter with the resources to do the work Kim would have done to cover subculture, broadly defined, including what she liked to call “the undercurrents of rebellion.”
Within four days of starting a crowdfunding campaign, the group collected $29,000 toward this cause. They aim to raise $100,000 to create an endowment that will fund Kim’s legacy in perpetuity.
Checks in support of the Kim Wall Memorial Fund can be sent to:
International Women’s Media Foundation
c/o Courtney Flanagan
165 K Street NW Suite 1275
Washington, DC 20006
If you are interested in supporting or learning more, please email: kimwallgrant@gmail.com.
Wall’s friend and colleague, Coleen Jose, wrote the following thoughts in a letter to the OPC about Kim’s memorial fund:
Despite Kim’s young age, she had already built an impressive body of work, writing for the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, Slate, Foreign Policy and Vice. Her stories were translated into several languages.
“As a small child, she was very determined in everything she did,” her mother Ingrid Wall said. Before she had turned one, she had traveled to most European countries, and had followed her parents, both of whom are journalists, on assignments on countless reporting trips. This, Ingrid thought, might disincline her from being drawn to what she calls the best profession. But growing up in a household that was organized around storytelling, it was natural that Kim would grow up to be a storyteller of the highest caliber.
Kim travelled to China, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Cuba, Iceland, Haiti, Spain, North Korea, India and the Marshall Islands, some trips supported by grants given out by the likes of the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. In her four short years as a full-time journalist, she wrote about Cuba’s underground market for digital content and culture, why Chinese feminists descended on the Women’s March in Washington D.C., how the politics of opportunity played out inside an emerging Chinatown in Uganda, and how female combatants of the Tamil Tigers were failed by the promises of a feminist utopia.
“Throughout it all, she usually researched and reported with limited support and funding—the life of a freelancer,” her friend Alexis Okeowo wrote in the New Yorker. “But, as a female journalist often working alone, she was more vulnerable, as women generally are, to violence. Kim worked on, anyway, and would have wanted other women to do the same.”
To read more about Wall and an expanded personal remembrance from Coleen Jose, click here >>